Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Lori Swanson fires Amy Lawler

The Star Tribune reports that Attorney General Lori Swanson has fired Amy Lawler, the young assistant AG who has been under suspension since she went public with accusations against her boss of mismanagement, union-busting and ethical improprieties.

The action reportedly came after University of St. Thomas School of Law Dean Thomas Mengler, whom the AG commissioned to look into the ethical allegations, issued a report finding "no evidence of any unethical conduct" by the AG.

Here are two interesting graphs from the Strib story;

Swanson released a statement saying that news coverage of Lawler's allegations earlier this year "ignored the fact that with only 90 days experience in the office, the attorney was in a questionable position to judge the procedures utilized by the office."

Brian Bergson, a spokesman for Swanson, said Lawler was terminated based on the report's findings and because of "other issues" that he did not identify.

13 comments:

One other (certainly unintended, but rather telling) quote in the story from Mr. Bergson: "So, again, proof that it was all about [union] organizing."

And Lori, many attorneys with far more than 90 days experience in the office have sent a loud message about the procedures and problems in your office...they've left! How long are you going to continue to ignore the discontent among your line attorneys?!

Lori's own hand-picked investigator "clears" her of charges of unethical conduct? Shocking. This is a great trick for any attorneys out there who get reported to the Lawyer's Board. Do you own investigation and get "cleared"! Brilliant.

I thought I'd read that Mengler's report only "cleared" Swanson on one of five charges, and he said that he didn't have enough information to make any findings on the other four. I also remember reading that Mengler acknowledged some limitations d - that he was the agent of the AG, couldn't promise confidentiality, couldn't compel anyone to talk to him, and wasn't taking sworn testimony. I really don't understand why this is being reported as an acquittal for the AGO when it seems like Mengler was qualifying his findings in his own report!

Well, that's a pretty "creative" reading of what I said. ... If you are talking about the Gray Plant I-35W bridge report, I believe I said that just because one party hires another to write a report, we shouldn't assume the result of the report is necessarily a foregone conclusion.

In the present case, I actually don't believe that Dean Mengler's report was biased. (Though again, as I said with Gray Plant, factors such as the methodology are certainly open to attack. In the present case, Mengler himself noted the limitations placed on him, including the situation under which the interviews were taken, the lack of a confidentiality guaranty, lack of subpoena power, etc.) ...

But why are you assuming that I disagree with the report? I think the ethics charges were ill-conceived. If you are going to make those charges, you need the evidence to back them up. Here, the one charge made with first-hand knowledge required an unproveable subjective reading of the AG's intent in ordering lawsuits to be filed.

I have always thought that the situation at the AG's Office is at heart a management-related one rather than an ethical one. I would like to have seen what Mengler had to say on the management issues, but he was specifically asked not to to look into those.